Joe Biden assumed the presidency of the United States to great acclaim. He had soundly defeated Donald Trump, despite the latter’s assertions that the November 2020 election had been stolen from him. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, certified Biden’s victory on 6 January 2021, despite the mob insurrection that was unleashed on the Capitol Building. Every state where Trump had contested the election ruled in Biden’s favour.
Biden was a veteran of the political landscape, having been elected to the US Senate from Delaware in 1973. For eight years, he served as Vice President under President Barack Obama. Little did anyone know that when he sat on the legendary desk in the Oval Office, he was on the crest of a wave.
It seemed like nothing could go wrong for him. His policies for coping with the COVID epidemic, focused on vaccinations and social distancing, were widely admired, despite being lambasted by Trump and his right-wing followers. His policies to mitigate climate change, including the provision of tax credits for installing solar panels and driving electric vehicles through the Inflation Reduction Act, won widespread praise in the scientific community.
And then the troubles began. While the decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan was a wise decision, the way the withdrawal was carried out was not. It unleashed calamities that were broadcast worldwide. Worse, the Taliban returned to power in Kabul.
And then came Biden’s response to Hamas’ attack of 7 October. Just a few days after the attack, he flew to Tel Aviv and stood next to the right-wing prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had always opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. Biden proudly claimed that he was standing in Tel Aviv as a “Christian Zionist,” becoming the first American president to make such a strong personal statement and the first American president to visit Israel during wartime.
He reiterated an iron-clad security guarantee to Israel and began an endless supply of arms and ammunition. Armed to the teeth with American weaponry, and with solid political support from America and a few western allies, Israel began to unleash an endless campaign of death and destruction in Gaza that shocked millions throughout the globe with its brutality. Country after country began to condemn it. South Africa, where the majority black community had experienced life under apartheid from a white minority community, took the lead in filing a case against Israel before the International Court of Justice.
The US continued to veto resolutions at the UN Security Council calling for a cease fire. This did not go unnoticed in the US and protests began to mount on university campuses. However, Biden did not move an inch. In fact, he began to malign the protestors for being antisemitic and pro-Hamas.
Then came the run-up for the US elections. As the sitting president, Biden was the obvious choice for the Democratic Party. But his debate with Donald Trump shattered the illusion that he had been putting forward in speech after speech: that only he could defeat Trump. He was incoherent during the debate. At one point, his answer to a question was so convoluted that Trump, in his rebuttal said that he did not understand Biden’s answer and quipped: I don’t think even he [Biden] understands what he is saying.
It was then that leader after leader in the Democratic Party urged him to not contest the election. Finally, he yielded. His vice president, Kamala Harris, was selected as the candidate. She ran an incredible campaign. Her speeches were eloquent and thoughtful and drew large rallies. The polls showed it was going to be a very tight race. Yet she lost.
Why? She only had a hundred days to run her campaign, she was not only a woman but a person of colour, and most saliently, was too close to Biden.
After the elections, Biden went on to say that he could have defeated Trump but conceded that he would not have been fit to govern two years into his term. And then came his farewell speech from the Oval Office. He recounted his achievements but the tone was sombre. At times, he sounded like he was delivering his own funeral oration.
How did matters come to such a sorry pass? According to a CNN poll, “Americans broadly view Biden’s four years in office more as a failure than as a success, with his administration doing little to turn around persistent negativity about the state of the country generally or about its economy.” The poll found that Biden’s favourability rating had been mired in the low 30s for much of the past two years.
Another poll, carried out for the Institute for Middle East Understanding by YouGov, was released on January 15. It found what few in the Democratic Party have been willing to admit: Kamala Harris lost the election because of Biden’s unfettered support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. In the 2024 election, some 19 million people who cast their vote for Biden in 2020 decided to not vote. Why? The ongoing onslaught in Gaza was cited as the top reason by 29%, the economy by 24% and illegal immigration by 11%.
On 20 January, Donald Trump will once again become the president of the US, only the second president in US history to have been re-elected for non-consecutive terms. Joe Biden will walk off the stage, having besmirched his legacy. Whether historians will look past his failings and write about his achievements, as they did with Jimmy Carter, remains to be seen.
In 1978, he facilitated the Camp David Accords which ushered in an era of peace between Egypt and Israel. In 2006, he wrote a book: Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid. Carter, unlike Biden, was a humanist. He spent his entire post-presidential period focused on helping impoverished people not just in the US but throughout the globe. And in the pursuit of peace. It’s highly unlikely that Biden will follow in Carter’s footsteps.
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